Be Careful Before You Call KOT “Dumb”

I’ve never written to the public editor of the Nation newspaper before but this : “If he is to be believed, Americans on Twitter are smarter than their Kenyan counterparts whose major preoccupation in social media seems to be trading insults, ethnic chauvinism and fake news.” rubbed me the wrong way.

This is an assumption not based on any research and I assume comes from the anecdotal evidence from the editor’s own twitter feed or those of his friends and colleagues. This is wrong. Twitter, in particular, is definitely a function of who you follow. What you see there is your own choice, mostly.

What the research has shown, see the Umati project by iHub, is that what you see online is a reflection of the conversations being had offline. They’re historical injustices that reinforce these prejudices that we, as a country, have refused to address. Instead of berating the online community you should think about addressing that.

Finally, I admire the amount of shortsightedness and hubris it takes to dismiss KOT, the same community that has forced news organisations around the world to retract shoddy, poor, misleading or just plain wrong reporting.

Your job is important but you would do well not to insult an entire community whose analogue elsewhere made your counterpart’s job operationally redundant.